I’d planned to post another video tutorial as today’s post, but I had a computer glitch on Friday that derailed those plans and sucked up a good portion of my weekend. Even after restarting, the fan kept running nonstop, plus the computer wouldn’t recognize the battery, even after I let it charge for six hours. I asked Mr. Muse (who is usually able to fix these things) and both of us were stumped, so we knew it was time to call in reinforcements.
On my first trip to the Genius Bar on Saturday morning, the Genius told me it would cost several hundred bucks and a week sans computer to replace the battery, motherboard, and fan, since it was three months out of warranty. Hard to say which part pissed me off more, and I admit I wasn’t the nicest person on the planet (in fact, I may have begun drafting a post about things to do with a dead MacBook – #12 earrings).
See, I initially resisted but eventually bought into the hype that “Macs are more expensive than PCs but they’ll last so much longer” and “Macs are virtually indestructible unless you drop it or spill on them (which, for the record, I didn’t)” and “extended warranties are a rip-off because people so seldomly use them.”
Everything was backed up (thank you, JungleDisk), but I took it home just to verify I had all the documents I needed for the next week. Best. Decision. Ever. Once I’d come to terms with paying for repairs and confirmed that my files were backed up, I brought it in again. This time, a different Genius suggested we try resetting the motherboard. And it worked!
“Sorry you had to drive all this way for nothing,” he said.
“No, you saved me several hundred bucks and fixed my MacBook, that was well worth the trip,” I told him.
Since freelancers are also their own IT person, the moral of the story is threefold:
- Back up your data early and often.
- Get a second opinion before paying for repairs.
- If you aren’t ready to replace it, consider buying the extended warranty. (Fortunately, my story has a happy ending but it was also a bit of a wakeup call for the future.)
What about you? Did you learn a technology lesson the hard way? What was it?
Flickr photo courtesy of djeucalyptus
